> Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 7:53 PM > From: "Siddhesh Poyarekar" <siddh...@gotplt.org> > To: "Christopher Dimech" <dim...@gmx.com> > Cc: "NightStrike" <nightstr...@gmail.com>, "Ville Voutilainen" > <ville.voutilai...@gmail.com>, "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> > Subject: Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate > > On 4/18/21 1:08 PM, Christopher Dimech wrote: > >> The cause IMO is accessibility to other projects, most notably compiler > >> researchers and students who find it a lot easier to target llvm than > >> gcc because compiler-as-a-library. License may have been a factor for > >> some of those uses (e.g. I know some who think copyleft is not free > >> enough and BSD style licensing is the *real* freedom), but concluding > >> that it is the major reason is to delude ourselves. > > > > Originally, the LLVM License was derived from the X11 License and the > > 3-Clause BSD License, both licenses conforming to the definition of > > free software. Apple officially hired Chris Lattner in 2005, giving > > him a team to work on LLVM. > > It is irrelevant to the point I'm making. If you're trying to assert > that Lattner's hiring by Apple was the driving force behind the current > llvm adoption then like I said before, it's blinkered. Read my response > again for a deeper context. > > >> It is also the reason why gcc does not even figure in situations where a > >> larger project would need AOT or JIT compilation; we had to concede that > >> ground all because of the FSF/GNU fears that companies would make > >> proprietary compilers out of a gcc compiler-as-a-library. > > > > Listen very carefully - In the first quarter of 2011, Keith Chuvala > > began discussing the need to drop all proprietary systems used to command > > the ISS. He specifically mentioned products from Microsoft and Red Hat. > > This was communicated to General Paul Martin, who then reported everything > > to the US House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. > > I can't parse what you're saying in response to my point about llvm > being the default choice for all modern use cases of compiler technologies.
Depends on the use cases. Not in military surveillance. And certainly not at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At Boeing could be the same, but I'm not sure. Before 2011, rather than building things from scratch, washington bureaucrats simply picked from among existing technology. But things had really been going berserk around 2008. From 2017 onwards, I'm somewhat in the dark. They could have started allowing some ownership rights, but ownership rights under government contracts are very different than ownership rights under commercial contracts. > Siddhesh >
